MANIFESTING MARGINS

A manifesto merely surfaces what is already there. Some overlooked evidence, waiting to be shaped by a deliberate act of cutting through the real. Margins, as well, are an act of cutting. They are a line traced not as a limitation, but as the beginning of something. They are a decision of spacemaking, just like a sculptor gives shape by carving an outline.

Manifesting Margins becomes this (somewhat catchy) movement of outlining the outline, in an attempt to find a way.

Through a rainforest of intricate crises.
Across mountain ranges of artificial divisions.
Out of an inward-focused abyss.

So what is the way?

1. HOLD THE PAGE

Migratory bird swarms are led by their fringes. They open the way, while the center follows blindfolded. As cultural practitioners in Europe, we naturally speak from the periphery. Our work fosters unheard, unseen, unfelt sensoriums, and proposes other rhythms and scales, different distributions. Our initiatives of worldbuilding invest, cultivate and groom our imaginary margins in a relentless practice of dissensus.

In search of a space to unfold those marginary imaginaries, we tend to our physical margins. We refuse to reduce them to spaces of ruination and collapse. They are robust¹ fields of transference: restless, porous, mediatic. 

As we shape invented spaces, we approach margins as spaces of invention. We trade our crowded centres, our huddled scenes, our off-ground institutions for outward looking ex-titutions—ones that mingle, ones that negotiate, ones that ‘can't keep good distinctions between natures and cultures straight’². Turning to the margins is hardly an act of decentring, only of desanthropocentering. For where is the center in nature?

2. SPAN THE NET

We join the porous margins and we make them touch. We connect our imaginary confines to the confines of our territory, of our systems, of our species—around our shared practices of sustenance. We weave a situated fabric along those adhesions, allowing new forms of coordination. We ask: which ecosystem can stand alone?

We relocate to co-construct (humans, other humans, non-humans, more-than-humans…) and reinforce through mutual nourishment, entanglement, attention. We connect the margins to invoke them as essential spaces of experimentation, of critical enquiry, of otherness. We merge the margins not for them to become new centers but for them to gain weight, visibility, agency, within their own marginary presencing.

We remember nets have holes. We acknowledge disparities, partialities and specificities, and let them emerge from the field to fill those alveoli. We hope to learn from this polyvocal commoning and develop tools to communicate with each other and nurture the wider audience.

3. BUILD A SHIP

We spanned a net, but we seek movement. We need to navigate our margins without disturbing their precious porosity. Some suggest it’s a Netship³, not a network. We build a Netship to sustain the waves those swampy twisted beings throw towards our centers. The nods of the net become archipelagos, islands of initiative one is able to visit. Take a trip across those fertile waters. It doesn’t have to be forever. It can be a time-off, a suspension, a voyage to vacancy. A tiny possibility for your body to be used in another way than what it has been (un)assigned to by our derealized cores. 

The marginary archipelago of the Netship recalls our expelled bodies and gives us space to move towards something else. We can listen to other stories and live out different relations to the world, develop a taste for conversation, remember our grandmothers and greet the migratory birds, expand and get lost, build new capacities, sensibilities and cares. This will not save the world, but some of it we could bring as a souvenir back home, and that might be of a little help for what is to come.

Text by Lily Matras

¹ cf. the idea of ‘robustness’ developed by Olivier Hamant

² Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto : Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2003.

³ The concept of the ‘Netship’ was coined by Elīza Dombrowska, Anna Majewska and Beate Poikāne during “Collective Practice”, an artistic research residency conducted by Anna Majewska and Sylwia Mieczkowska and curated by Artūrs Čukurs and Ada Ruszkiewicz at close-to-nature open-air art space Savvaļa in Latvia, constituted around the motto “For life to be liveable and for art to be meaningful”.